Excellent review enjoy and trust your reviews much more compared to the marketing driven/scripted ones that only show something working perfectly.

Given it's open source I can't help but wonder how many weeks before the Chinese are pumping them out at a fraction of the price with links to Digilent's website for the software. Then it may be worth getting one as the UK Price is £83.27 from RS-Components so given its limitations and software that's currently a pass.

For $99, hardware wise looks way better (10MHz, 100MS/S digital). Software mentions network analyzer and spectrum analyzer. But who knows if it will ever be released, and the software will be supported.Analog discovery used to be available at this price point, but now even with the student discount is much more expensive.

For $99, hardware wise looks way better (10MHz, 100MS/S digital). Software mentions network analyzer and spectrum analyzer. But who knows if it will ever be released, and the software will be supported.Analog discovery used to be available at this price point, but now even with the student discount is much more expensive.

This thing is a toy, so I don't know any of the core devs willing to waste their time writing a driver for it. Digilent did get in touch with us regarding support for their devices in sigrok but as of now we have no idea how much support from their side this would entail. If it's a mere "here, have the hardware and the comm protocol" kind of deal then I'd expect the Open Scope MZ to be passed on. Simply because it's just not worth our time. However, drivers contributed by the community would of course be welcome.

Given it's open source I can't help but wonder how many weeks before the Chinese are pumping them out at a fraction of the price with links to Digilent's website for the software.

I did a quick profitability analysis, and it seems like it's not worth it. The BOM is about $40 in mass quantity, and given none of the parts are easily available in China, the cloners need to source them from distributors. If the cloner is a small comnay without import/export license, then they will have to pay 20% import package tax, so that's $48 BOM.

According to PCBWay PCBA quoting system, PCB+PCBA would be $5 per board, that adds the bottom line to $53. Then there are accessories and packaging, let's say totally $60.

It's schematic and firmware are open source, but the PCB is not. Let's say, an average EE service costs ~$10 per hour in China, and it will take at least 100 hours to get the board cloned, so that's $1000 NRE. If the cloner can sell 200 pcs, then that's $5 per unit engineering cost.

There's no way you can profit cloning something that has $65 cost and sell for significantly cheaper than $89.

Sure, it can be made much cheaper by replacing the PIC32 with STM32, and the WiFi module with ESP32, but that requires extensive engineering, talking about $10000 on engineering. Unless you can sell this by thousands, you are still not very competitive.

For $99, hardware wise looks way better (10MHz, 100MS/S digital). Software mentions network analyzer and spectrum analyzer. But who knows if it will ever be released, and the software will be supported.Analog discovery used to be available at this price point, but now even with the student discount is much more expensive.

I'm one of the Kickstarter backers and the whole thing is just a huge mess and a major letdown.

The whole project is just all over the place. The project people are obviously overwhelmed. The engineers haven't even close to delivered the promised features and progress seems to be pretty much dead: you can count the software releases on one hand and they seem to be only slight bugfix releases (from looking at the source because no release notes -- who reads release notes anyway...). The current software is so buggy to the point of being totally useless. There's no offline support out-of-the-box (requires to manually install the Waveforms Live on the device which is a rather involved process). Capturing via WiFi only seems to work every full moon or so and even over USB is so quirky that you'll never know whether the DUT or the "scope" is at fault. In other words: Totally useless, a toy at best; but then again there're much better toys out there.

Heck, even their shipping department messed up the shipping declaration and doesn't respond to inquiries I've been asked by other Digilent people to make.

The only takeaway from this project is: Sometimes it takes a completely botched project like this to see the reality of a shitty company behind a brand with a supposedly good reputation. I'll make sure to stay the hell away from Digilent in the future.

The whole project is just all over the place. The project people are obviously overwhelmed. The engineers haven't even close to delivered the promised features and progress seems to be pretty much dead: you can count the software releases on one hand and they seem to be only slight bugfix releases (from looking at the source because no release notes -- who reads release notes anyway...). The current software is so buggy to the point of being totally useless. There's no offline support out-of-the-box (requires to manually install the Waveforms Live on the device which is a rather involved process). Capturing via WiFi only seems to work every full moon or so and even over USB is so quirky that you'll never know whether the DUT or the "scope" is at fault. In other words: Totally useless, a toy at best; but then again there're much better toys out there.

Interesting. I didn't think to check the Kickstarter updates and comments.

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The only takeaway from this project is: Sometimes it takes a completely botched project like this to see the reality of a shitty company behind a brand with a supposedly good reputation. I'll make sure to stay the hell away from Digilent in the future.

How is the Analog Discovery so well received then?Entirely different team?

Seems to be neither fish nor fowl. And using JS doesn't give me any confidence in the product either. I'm a hobbyist and I think the 90 bucks for the Open Scope MZ could be spent on something more useful.

Seems to be neither fish nor fowl. And using JS doesn't give me any confidence in the product either. I'm a hobbyist and I think the 90 bucks for the Open Scope MZ could be spent on something more useful.

Sure, but why not make Prog and Reset text larger? Then the end user would read the important one first, and not the designator. They missed a lot of opportunity to put information on the silkscreen. Of course if whoever made the board expected it to be in a decent case, silkscreen info wouldn't be needed.

Sure, but why not make Prog and Reset text larger? Then the end user would read the important one first, and not the designator. They missed a lot of opportunity to put information on the silkscreen. Of course if whoever made the board expected it to be in a decent case, silkscreen info wouldn't be needed.